On 20 November 2009, emails and other documents, apparently originating from with the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

If real, these emails contain some quite surprising and even disappointing insights into what has been happening within the climate change scientific establishment. Worryingly this same group of scientists are very influential in terms of economic and social policy formation around the subject of climate change.

As these emails are already in the public domain, I think it is important that people are able to look through them and judge for themselves. Until I am told otherwise I have no reason to think the text found on this site is true or false. It is here just as a curiosity!

You can either search using the keyword search box above, or use the links below to browse them 25 emails at a time.

Agree with Kevin that Tom Karl has too much to do. Tom Wigley is semi retired and like Mike Wallace may not be responsive to requests from JGR. We have Ben Santer in common ! Dave Thompson is a good suggestion. I'd go for one of Tom Peterson or Dave Easterling. To get a spread, I'd go with 3 US, One Australian and one in Europe. So Neville Nicholls and David Parker. All of them know the sorts of things to say - about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.

Cheers

Phil

-----------------------------

All of them know the sorts of things to say - about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.

While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.

In 2000 and 2001, while Barack Obama served as a board member for a Chicago-based charitable foundation, he helped to fund a pioneering carbon trading exchange that is likely to fill a critical role in the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme that President Obama is now trying to push rapidly through Congress.

During those two years, the Joyce Foundation gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself "North America's only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide."

One of those gases is carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas and the focus of the most far-reaching -- and contentious -- efforts to combat "climate change." On Monday, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency declared carbon dioxide a public health threat.

The President of the Joyce Foundation in 2000, when the foundation made its first grant to the Climate Exchange, was Paula DiPerna, who is now executive vice president of the Chicago Climate Exchange in charge of corporate recruitment and public policy, as well as president of CCX International.

DiPerna left the foundation in November 2001 and joined the Exchange. It was the same year in which the foundation gave its second and much larger grant to the exchange. The Exchange finally launched in 2003.

Reached at her office in New York, DiPerna said President Obama, who in 2000 was a candidate for Congress, was involved as a director of the foundation and voted on the proposal but declined to detail that involvement other than that "he read the proposal and voted on the grant."

She referred subsequent questions to the exchange's communications office.

In response to questions from FOX News about Obama's relationship to the project a White House spokesman said "the President has long believed that a market-based cap-and-trade system is the best way to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions and to promote our energy security. The success of the cap-and-trade approach in reducing acid rain demonstrates that providing incentives for companies to reduce their emissions is effective."

Obama's espousal of cap-and-trade, a system that is intended, among other things, to increase the price of fossil fuels and force their replacement by energy sources that produce less greenhouse gases, has drawn fire from many economists as a huge energy tax that will weigh heavily on an economy that is already in steep recession. The price tag has been put high as $2 trillion dollars over eight years. That figure, nearly three times higher than originally projected, was given in a White House briefing to Senate staffers last week and reported by US News and World Report and the Washington Times.

The scheme has also drawn attacks from 28 U.S. Senators, including West Virginia's Robert Byrd and Michigan's Carl Levin, both Democrats, who have criticized Obama for floating the idea that he would attach the measure to the current budget reconciliation process, to avoid a filibuster in Congress.

An open letter signed by the dissident senators declared that "enactment of a cap-and-trade regime is likely to influence nearly every feature of the U.S. economy. Legislation so far-reaching should be fully vetted and given appropriate time for debate, something the budget reconciliation process does not allow."

Obama served as one of 12 directors on the Joyce Foundation board from July 1994 until December 2002, according to a Joyce foundation spokesman. But it was only in 2000 and 2001 that the foundation gave money to the Climate Exchange -- funds deemed by the exchange itself to be fundamental to its successful launch, and in fact to its early survival.

Somewhere in every family there is a treasured, ancient tool that has passed down from generation to generation; this is sometimes referred to as the ‘legacy hammer;’ although in all these years of use and handing down this treasured tool, it remains in use, having had, at various times the necessary replacement of the occasional broken handle or lost head.

So it seems, is the case in the current saga...

62
posted on 11/20/2009 4:43:13 PM PST
by Old Professer
(The critic writes with rapier pen, dips it twice, then writes again.)

Section 4 , end. years 1997 and onwards were the warmest in the millennium. I see here also potential problems with this claim, and I do not see the need to make our lives more complicated. The NAS report expressed that the uncertainties are too large for this type of conclusion and certainly this conclusion would attract some attention from the reader.

(Clip)

The other line of criticism could be that the calibration period has been, as in all reconstructions, a priori truncated -data after 1980 are not considered as the proxies are known to not follow the temperature. Strictly speaking this truncation can be only justified by a credible physical explanation about the cause of this divergence. Statistically, I think it is not correct to a priori ignore some data because they do not fit.

Know anything about the “divergence problem” in tree rings? R D’arrigo >>>talked to the NRC yesterday. I didn’t get to talk to her afterward, but >>>it looked to me that they have redrilled a bunch of the high-latitude tree >>>rings that underlie almost all of the high-res reconstructions, and the >>>tree rings are simply missing the post-1970s warming, with reasonably high >>>confidence. She didn’t seem too worried, but she apparently has a paper >>>just out in JGR. It looked to me like she had pretty well killed the >>>hockey stick in public forum—they go out and look for the most-sensitive >>>trees at the edge of the treeline, flying over lots and lots of >>>trees that are >>>lesss sensitive but quite nearby, and when things get a little warmer, the >>>most-sensitive trees aren’t anymore, and so the trees miss the extreme >>>warming of the recent times, and can’t reliably be counted as catching >>>the extreme warmth of the MWP if there was extreme warmth then. >>>Because as far as I can tell the hockey stick really was a >>>tree-ring >>>record, regardless of how it was labelled as multiproxy, this looks to me >>>to be a really big deal. And, a big deal that may bite your chapter...

I also think we had to protest when erroneous data like the claim that winter temperature in Abisko increased by 5.5 deg C during the last 100 years. The real increase is 0.4 deg C. The 5.5 deg C figure has been repeated a number of times in TV-programs. This kind of exaggerations is not supporting attempts to save fossil fuel.

I just posted that same e-mail on another site. It is extremely dismaying, although I suppose not surprising, that these people seem to spend as much time trying to spin the media and set up “campaigns” as they do researching.

Thanks for copying me on your correspondence with Fred and prompting me to look again at IPCC sea level rise estimates for 2100. I agree you are comparing like-for-like. The 2001 report has an upper limit of 0.7 meters for the A1B scenario. If the 2007 report lowers this to 0.43 meters (or if the number gets raised again before the report is made final) it will certainly be appropriate to ask why. After reading Hansen's recent papers, I don't see how to justify such small upper limits. It also seems obvious to me (and apparently to you but not to Fred) that the A2 scenario would entail more sea level rise than A1B. Regarding the relative likelihoods of scenarios, I don't agree with you that it's "almost certain" that world population will "plummet" in the second half of this century.

Regarding the issue of recent vs. earlier global warming, when I look at the totality of data compiled by North et al. this year for their NAS / NRC report (see attached graphic), it seems clear that most of the warming since about 1850 (or 1900) occurred in recent decades. Going farther back in time, the data are of course more uncertain and estimates vary, but it appears that the warming rate for the 20th century was unusually high compared with the past 2000 years. This conclusion follows whether or not one includes Mike Mann's data. For the record, I must add that I do not share your characterization of Mann's work as "rubbish" or "useless." Nor do I see a situation of "flagrant dishonesty in which the UN and the scientific journals persist long after the falsity of their absurd and extreme claims has been properly demonstrated."

Sincerely,

Curt Covey

Christopher Monckton wrote:

Dear Fred, - Many thanks for sending me this exchange. Some comments:

Temperature: This question, like so many others to do with supposed "climate change", is bedevilled by the recency of reliable, instrument-based observations. Nevertheless, some conclusions can be attempted. The Dalton Minimum is generally considered to have come to an end in 1910. The five-year mean global land and sea surface air temperature anomaly for 1908-1912, calculated from NCDC annual figures, was --0.3579K. By 1940 there had been a rapid increase of 0.4700K to +1121K. By 2004 (again taking the five-year average, including 2006) there had been a further increase of +0.4413K to +0.5534. The mean annual increase in the 30 years 1010-1940 was thus 0.0157K more than two and a quarter times greater than the 0.0069K mean annual increase in the 64 years to 2004. Mean global temperature has hardly risen at all in the five years since the IPCC's last report. And the fact of the 20th-century temperature increase tells us nothing of the cause. It is interesting, for instance, that the polar icecaps on Mars are receding, inferentially in response to increased solar activity. At any rate, it is certain that anthropogenic planetary warming is not responsible. It is possible, therefore, that most of the warming both before and after 1940 was heliogenic.

Sea level: Your correspondent does not disagree with my statement that the IPCC has revised its upper-bound estimate of sea level rise to 17 inches (0.43m). He says, however, that this upper bound is based on the A1 scenario, by which world population will peak in mid-century at ~9bn and fall thereafter. So was the 2001 report's upper bound of 0.88m. I was correctly comparing like for like. The Sunday Telegraph, which reported these figures, has been told that the revisions arise from "better data" now available to the IPCC, supporting skeptics' conclusions that the IPCC's figures are little better than exaggerated guesses. Morner (2004) concludes firmly that there is little evidence for sea level rising any faster now than it has in geologically-recent times. Your correspondent says that the A2 scenario is "business-as-usual": in fact, it is an extreme scenario regarded by very nearly all serious demographers as absurdly unrealistic, in that it posits an increase in world population to 15bn by 2100, when it is now almost certain that rising prosperity and the consequent decrease in birth rates will cause population to peak somewhere between 9bn and 10bn in mid-century, and plummet thereafter.

Reliability of the IPCC's reports: I understand that the IPCC's 2007 draft does not contain an apology for the defective "hockey-stick" graph, which the US National Academy of Sciences has described as having "a validation skill not significantly different from zero". In plain English, this means the graph was rubbish. It is difficult to have confidence in a body which, after its principal conclusion is demonstrated in the peer-reviewed, scientific literature and in numerous independent reports as having been useless, fails to make the appropriate withdrawal and apology. Worse, the UN continues to use the defective graph. This failure of basic academic honesty on the IPCC's part was the main reason why I began my investigation of the supposed climate-change "consensus". The supposed scientific "consensus": Your correspondent seems unaware of the letter written by 61 Canadian and other scientists in climate and related fields to the Canadian Prime Minister. At the end of the attached commentary on Al Gore's recent attempt to rebut my articles on climate change in the Sunday Telegraph, beneath the references, I have appended the full text of the letter and the names, qualifications and then-current affiliations of all 61 scientists. Al gore and others tend to lean rather more heavily than is wise upon a single, rather bad one-page essay in Science for their contention that there is a scientific consensus to the effect that most of the warming in the past half-century was anthropogenic. The essay was by Oreskes (2004), who said that she had analyzed 928 abstracts mentioning "climate change" published in peer-reviewed journals on the Thomson ISI database between 1993 and 2003, and that none of the 928 had expressed dissent from the "consensus". Dr. Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University subsequently made a more careful enquiry. Science had been compelled to publish an erratum to the effect that the search term used by Oreskes had not been the neutral "climate change" - which returned some 12,000 articles, but the more loaded "global climate change", which returned 1,117 articles. Of these, Dr. Peiser found that only 1% had explicitly endorsed the "consensus" as defined by Oreskes"; that almost three times as many had explicitly expressed doubt or outright disagreement; and that less than one-third had expressed explicit or implicit agreement with the "consensus". He wrote a paper for Science pointing out these serious defects, which pointed to a conclusion diametrically opposite to that of Oreskes. Science at first asked him to shorten his paper, and then said that, because conclusions like his had been widely reported on the internet, his paper would not be published. As far as I can discover, Science has not published any corrigendum to this day, providing further confirmation of what I have long suspected: that the leading peer-reviewed journals, having unwisely taken strongly-political editorial positions on the question of climate change, are no longer objective. The need for honest science: It was only after years of increasingly-public pressure that Nature was induced to oblige Mann et al., the authors of the useless "hockey-stick" graph that starred in the IPCC's 2001 report, to publish a mealy-mouthed, partial and unsatisfactory corrigendum. In such an environment of flagrant dishonesty in which the UN and the scientific journals persist long after the falsity of their absurd and extreme claims has been properly demonstrated, it is in my view unreasonable to expect China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and other fast-polluting countries to deny to themselves the fossil-fuelled economic growth which we in the West have been fortunate enough to enjoy. Until there is honest science, no one will believe either the UN or the journals to the extent of adopting the expensive and (on my calculations) probably futile remedial measures which they and their supporters so stridently advocate. - Christopher

And here is the awesome followup email:

Curt, I can't believe the nonsense you are spouting, and I furthermore cannot imagine why you would be so presumptuous as to entrain me into an exchange with these charlatans. What ib earth are you thinking? You're not even remotely correct in your reading of the report, first of all. The AR4 came to stronger conclusions that IPCC(2001) on the paleoclimate conclusions, finding that the recent warmth is likely anomalous in the last 1300 years, not just the last 1000 years. The AR4 SPM very much backed up the key findings of the TAR The Jones et al reconstruction which you refer to actually looks very much like ours, and the statement about more variability referred to the 3 reconstructions (Jones et al, Mann et al, Briffa et a) shown in the TAR, not just Mann et al. The statement also does not commit to whether or not those that show more variability are correct or not. Some of those that do (for example, Moberg et al and Esper et al) show no similarity to each other. I find it terribly irresponsible for you to be sending messages like this to Singer and Monckton. You are speaking from ignorance here, and you must further know how your statements are going to be used. You could have sought some feedback from others who would have told you that you are speaking out of your depth on this. By instead simply blurting all of this nonsense out in an email to these sorts charlatans you've done some irreversible damage. shame on you for such irresponsible behavior!

Covey was having an email conversation with Lord Monckton about some of the IPCC reports. He cc’d some colleagues on the emails. Mann sent him the smack-down for straying from the Gore faith and talking to a ‘charlatan’.

84
posted on 11/20/2009 6:07:39 PM PST
by Pan_Yan
(Do I have to add a sarcasm tag?)

As the University of East Anglia Climate Research Units (CRU) apparently hacked files have spread throughout the blogosphere, I downloaded all 160-some MB of the e-mails and documents, and started to clicking away randomly. I stumbled across this e-mail from Kevin Trenberth who was an IPCC lead author. The subject of the day seems to be how to explain the lack of warming for the past decade or so. Trenberth wrote his e-mail just last month from an unseasonably cold Boulder, Colorado, and the e-mail was sent to one or more of the following: Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Stephen Schneider, and James Hansen, among others.

Our favorite contrarian, the potty peer Christopher Monckton has been indulging in a little aristocratic artifice again. Not one to be constrained by mere facts or observable reality, he has launched a sally against Andy Revkin for reporting the shocking news that past industry disinformation campaigns were not sincere explorations of the true uncertainties in climate science. The letter he has written to the NY Times public editor, with its liberal sprinkling of his usual pomposity, has at its heart the following graph:

Among other issues, it is quite amusing that Monckton apparently thinks that;

trends from January 2002 are relevant to a complaint about a story discussing a 1995 report,

someone might be fooled by the cherry-picked January 2002 start date,

no-one would notice that he has just made up the IPCC projection curves

The last is even more amusing because he was caught out making stuff up on a slightly different figure just a few weeks ago.

To see the extent of this chicanery, one needs only plot the actual IPCC projections against the observations. This can be done a number of ways, firstly, plotting the observational data and the models used by IPCC with a common baseline of 1980-1999 temperatures (as done in the 2007 report) (Note that the model output is for the annual mean, monthly variance would be larger):

These show clearly that 2002-2009 is way too short a period for the trends to be meaningful and that Moncktons estimate of what the IPCC projects for the current period is woefully wrong. Not just wrong, fake.

Even if one assumes that the baseline should be the year 2002 making no allowance for internal variability (which makes no sense whatsoever), you would get the following graph:

- still nothing like Monckton showed. Instead, he appears to have derived his projections by drawing a line from 2002 to a selection of real projections in 2100 and ignoring the fact that the actual projections accelerate as time goes on, and thus strongly over-estimating the projected changes that are expected now (see here).

Lest this be thought a mere aberration or a slip of his quill, it turns out he has previously faked the data on projections of CO2 as well. This graph is from a recent presentation of his, compared to the actual projections:

How can this be described except as fake?

Apart from this nonsense, is there anything to Moncktons complaint about Revkins story? Sadly no. Once one cuts out the paranoid hints about dark conspiracies between prejudiced campaigners, Al Gore and the New York Times editors, the only point he appear to make is that this passage from the scientific advice somehow redeems the industry lobbyists who ignored it:

The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential for a human impact on climate is based on well-established scientific fact, and should not be denied. While, in theory, human activities have the potential to result in net cooling, a concern about 25 years ago, the current balance between greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions of particulates and particulate-formers is such that essentially all of todays concern is about net warming. However, as will be discussed below, it is still not possible to accurately predict the magnitude (if any), timing or impact of climate change as a result of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. Also, because of the complex, possibly chaotic, nature of the climate system, it may never be possible to accurately predict future climate or to estimate the impact of increased greenhouse gas concentrations.

This is a curious claim, since the passage is pretty much mainstream. For instance, in the IPCC Second Assessment Report (1995) (p528):

Complex systems often allow deterministic predictability of some characteristics yet do not permit skilful forecasts of other phenomena

or even more clearly in IPCC TAR (2001):

In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the systems future possible states .

Much more central to the point Revkin was making was the deletion of the sections dealing with how weak the standard contrarian arguments were  arguments that GCC publications continued to use for years afterward (and indeed arguments that Monckton is still using) (see this amendment to the original story).

Moncktons ironic piece de resistance though is the fact that he entitled his letter Deliberate Misrepresentation  and this is possibly the only true statement in it.

None of us at RC have any real idea what was done or why and so we are singularly unable to sensibly counter the flood of nonsense. Of course, most of the reaction is hugely overblown and mixed up but it would be helpful to have some kind of counterpoint to the main thrust. If you can point to someone else that could be helpful, please do!

Thanks

Gavin

Once again the aforementioned Mr. Mann is involved.

89
posted on 11/20/2009 6:14:35 PM PST
by Pan_Yan
(Do I have to add a sarcasm tag?)

It has been hard for me to tell. Mann seems to have come from obscurity as an Associate Adjunct Professor to the U of Mass and then?

In the early time of this thread (ca 1996 or 1997) he read more like a groupie who was trying to find a way to make his academic star rise and then along about 2000, when he got his ears boxed by his department head, started to fall away.

91
posted on 11/20/2009 6:17:27 PM PST
by Sequoyah101
(Half of the population is below average)

In this post, I will restrict myself to discussing the implied claims about the IPCC projections for surface temperature in that graph. Im even going focus on this:

Is the dark lavender line in the middle of the lavender region a fair representation of the IPCCs projection? (I assume Monckton means the IPCC projection in the AR4.)

I think the answer is: Ehrmm . no.

What does Moncktons seem communicate about IPPC projections?

I think Moncktons figure suggests the IPCC projected that between Jan 2001 and Dec 2008 the underlying trend for surface temperature was more or less linear with a trend of approximately 0.35 C/decade.. I say it appears to suggest this because a) it shows this specific time period and b) the slope of the lavender line is about 0.35 C/decade.

The suggestion of linearity is essentially true; the suggestion that the trend is 0.35 C/decade over that period of time is, at best, deceptive. Maybe we could call it artful.

What did the IPCC really project?

The IPCC projection as communicated in figure 10.4 of the WG1 report to the AR4 creates a projection for the underlying trend (or expected value of the surface temperature) by averaging over all models used. This results in a more-or less smoothly varying function.

For short periods of time this smoothly varying function can be treated as approximately linear. So, I have no objections to Moncktons decision to show a linear trend between 2001-2008.

However . 0.35C/decade? For this decade? Where does he get that? As far as I can tell, the claim for this trend appears on page 4 of the pdf, where Monckton inserts a figure explained by this caption:

Ive scanned the rest of the article for further discussion to justify the rend of approximately 0.35 C/decade in Moncktons graph. The numerical value 0.35 C/decade bothers me because:

Figure 10.4 in the Chapter 10 of the WG1 of the AR4 shows non-linearity for every scenarios, and all scenarios show trends closer to 0.2 C/decade during the period in Moncktons graphs.

Figure 2: Figure 10.4 from WG1 to the AR4 (annotated).

Table 10.5 in Chapter 10 of the WG1 of the AR4 contains numerical projections for that corresponds to trends of 0.21 C/decade, 0.23 C/decade and 0.22 C/decade for scenarios a2, a1b and b1 respectively during the early portion of this century. Higher trends are justified later in the century but are irrelevant to when comparing 2001-2008 data to IPCC projections.

On page 12 of the Summary for Policy Makers of the WG1, the authors says we expect about 0.2 C per decade of warming over the next two decades.

In the past, when I have interpreted all the above to mean the authors projected the underlying trend to be about 0.2C per decade and used 0.2 per decade when comparing to projections to data.

I have been criticized and told that I must use the average based on the actual model runs.

In response to that criticism, I obtained the monthly average GMST for those runs, and happen to know magnitude of trends we obtain if we average over runs forced with the SRES a1b scenarios. I computed trends for Jan 2001-Nov. 2008, then averaged trends weighting several ways. If I weight each run equally, I obtain an average trend of 0.25 C/decade. If I weight each model average equally, I obtain an average trend of 0.26 C/decade. (Note: this includes a few models not used in the AR4 and is based on models I downloaded from The Climate Explorer.)

On Sep 29, 2009, at 4:30 PM, Andrew Revkin wrote: needless to say, seems the 2008 pnas paper showing that without tree rings still solid picture of unusual recent warmth, but McIntyre is getting wide play for his statements about Yamal data-set selectivity. Has he communicated directly to you on this and/or is there any indication he's seeking journal publication for his deconstruct? -- Andrew C. Revkin The New York Times / Environment 620 Eighth Ave., NY, NY 10018 Tel: 212-556-7326 Mob: 914-441-5556 Fax: 509-357-0965 [2]http://www.nytimes.com/revkin

93
posted on 11/20/2009 6:24:39 PM PST
by grey_whiskers
(The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)

If you want to read some interesting remarks about the tree ring debacle look Here

Briffa has already made a preliminary response and he failed to explain his selection procedure. Further, he refused to give up the data for several years, and was forced to do so only when he submitted to a journal that demanded data archiving and actually enforced the practice. More significantly, Briffa's analysis is irrelevant. Dendrochonology is a bankrupt approach. They admit that they cannot distiguish causal elements contributing to tree ring size. Further, they rely on recent temperature data by which to select recent tree data (excluding other data) and then turn around and claim that the tree ring data explains the recent temperature data. If you can give a principled and reasoned defense of Briffa (see the discussion on Watt's website) then go for it. I'd be fascinated, as would a rather large number of others.

94
posted on 11/20/2009 6:29:48 PM PST
by Pan_Yan
(Do I have to add a sarcasm tag?)

I concede all of your points but add one other thought. It is my grandchildren I worry about and I suspect their grand children will find it exceedingly warm because sunspots will return and carbon abatement is only a game; It wont happen significantly in their lifetime AND IT WONT BE ENOUGH IN ANY CASE. HENCE _WE WILL NEED A GEOENGINEERING SOLUTION_ COME WHAT MAY! -gene

DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING!

NO MORE CALLS, PLEASE.

WE HAVE A SMOKING GUN.

Please save the page from the search which brought this up.

We need to save it for posterity PRONTO.

Cheers!

95
posted on 11/20/2009 6:32:44 PM PST
by grey_whiskers
(The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)

I concede all of your points but add one other thought. It is my grandchildren I worry about and I suspect their grand children will find it exceedingly warm because sunspots will return and carbon abatement is only a game; It wont happen significantly in their lifetime AND IT WONT BE ENOUGH IN ANY CASE. HENCE _WE WILL NEED A GEOENGINEERING SOLUTION_ COME WHAT MAY!

-gene

/Eugene I. Gordon/

"carbon abatement is only a game"

It appears Mr. Gordon doesn't think carbon credits are worth a whole lot. I wonder if he has stated that publically?

96
posted on 11/20/2009 6:34:46 PM PST
by Pan_Yan
(Do I have to add a sarcasm tag?)

Thanks for the extensive and detailed e-mail. This is terrible but not surprising. Obviously I do not know what gives with these guys. However, I have my own suspicions and hypothesis. I dont think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare tactics. That is not to say that global warming is not occurring to some extent since it would be even without CO2 emissions. The CO2 emissions only accelerate the warming and there are other factors controlling climate. As a result, the entire process may be going slower than the powers that be would like. Hence, (I postulate) the global warming contingent has substantial motivation to be dishonest or seriously biased, and to be loyal to their equally dishonest club members. Among the motivations are increased and continued grant funding, university advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.

Alan, this is nothing new. You and I experienced similar behavior from some of our colleagues down the hall, the Bell Labs research people, in the good old days. Humans are hardly perfect creations. I am never surprised at what they can do. _I am perpetually grateful for those who are honest and fair and thankfully there is a goodly share of those._

-gene

98
posted on 11/20/2009 6:38:56 PM PST
by Pan_Yan
(Do I have to add a sarcasm tag?)

And the reply is damning as well. Remember, IPCC is Gore's Holy Grail:

Gene:

I've been following this issue closely and this is what I take away from it: 1) Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with so much uncertainty, they have no value whatever. It is impossible to tease out the relative contributions of rainfall, nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight. Indeed a single tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century temperature reconstruction.

2) The IPCC peer review process is fundamentally flawed if a lead author is able to both disregard and ignore criticisms of his own work, where that work is the critical core of the chapter. It not only destroys the credibility of the core assumptions and data, it destroys the credibility of the larger work - in this case, the IPCC summary report and the underlying technical reports. It also destroys the utility and credibility of the modeling efforts that use assumptions on the relationship of CO2 to temperature that are based on Britta's work, which is, of course, the majority of such analyses.

Nonetheless, and even if the UNEP thinks it appropriate to rely on Wikipedia as their scientific source of choice, greenhouse gases may (at an ever diminishing probability) cause a significant increase in global temperature. Thus, research, including field trials, on the leading geoengineering techniques are appropriate as a backstop in case our children find out that the current alarmism is justified.

David Schnare

99
posted on 11/20/2009 6:41:37 PM PST
by Pan_Yan
(Do I have to add a sarcasm tag?)

David Schnare is the senior fellow for energy and the environment for the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. He is an attorney and scientist with 32 years of federal and private-sector experience consulting on and litigating local, state, federal, and international environmental legislative, regulatory, risk management, and free-market environmentalism issues. Formerly the nations chief regulatory analyst for small business (Office of Small Business Advocacy), Schnare has experience on Congressional staff, as a trial lawyer with the Department of Justice and the Office of the Virginia Attorney General, as senior enforcement counsel at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and as an appellate attorney for private clients.

100
posted on 11/20/2009 6:43:28 PM PST
by Pan_Yan
(Do I have to add a sarcasm tag?)

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